Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
Fourth in a series examining the state of the homosexual rights movement.
May 1999 – The statistics no longer need to be repeated to a culture already painfully aware of its own sickness: the highest divorce rate in the nation’s history, readily available pornography, desperately high levels of teen pregnancies, abortions, and drug abuse. With raging and destructive epidemics like these, who would be surprised to discover that many children and teens feel confused concerning some of the most basic questions of life?
Following in the destructive wake of such social infirmities comes yet another commotion – that over the issue of sexual orientation. Homosexual activists have largely spent the 1990s manufacturing intense confusion about the cause and nature of their lifestyle.
What is the effect on children and teenagers when they are surrounded by a message that not only defends homosexuality as normal, natural and healthy, but recommends it as a sexual taste? Are young people being recruited into the homosexual lifestyle?
Confusing impressionable minds
Even in the best of times, young people very often find themselves confused about many issues – not the least of which is sex. Whether it is part of the normal adolescent journey to sexual identity or a spin-off effect of the current debate over homosexuality, some young people do question whether or not they are heterosexual.
For example, in a 1992 survey of nearly 35,000 Minnesota youth, homosexual researcher Gary Remafedi at the University of Minnesota found that 25.9% of 12-year-olds were not sure whether they were heterosexual or homosexual.
But Remafedi also found that such confusion begins to decrease as students grow older. Research by Dr. Kirk Cameron concurred. In a paper published in 1995 by Family Research Institute (FRI), that study found that while 25% of kids were unsure of their sexual orientation at age 12, that percentage steadily declined to about 5% by age 18.
Obviously, this early period of confusion is a critical time for young people. But the resulting confusion created by homosexuals about sexual orientation adds to the sexual confusion of young people. And even more insidious is the manner in which homosexual activists take advantage of this confusion by enthusiastically encouraging young people to experiment with homosexuality.
In Northboro, Massachusetts, for example, parents of freshmen were stunned to discover that their kids had been invited by their high school history teacher to try homosexuality. History teacher Douglas Matthews – an advisor to the school’s “gay-straight” student alliance – handed out a questionnaire that asked, “If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex and enjoyed it, is it possible that all you need is a good gay lover?”
Homosexual porn via the classroom?
It may shock parents to learn that the nation’s public school system is being used by homosexual activists as a conduit, herding confused children into the homosexual community. Under the guise of protecting homosexual teens, young people are given unrestricted access to homosexual groups. Once channeled there, however, there is no limit to the depths of same-sex debauchery to which teens may be exposed.
In Seattle, for example, the Sexual Minority Advocacy Council (SMAC) was created “to help ensure that [the Seattle public schools] are providing a safe environment for everyone who learns, works or interacts…,” according to school superintendent John H. Stanford.
But with the student-safety concern out in front, the purpose of SMAC then “bleeds over” into other areas. An SMAC pamphlet produced by the Seattle Education Association and made available to all students included a list of resources that amounts to a Seattle same-sex smorgasbord for curious teens, complete with phone numbers: Lesbian Resource Center; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Youth Information Line; Lambert House Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth Drop-In Center; and Gay/Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
What do kids find when they access the homosexual activist groups provided as resources by the pamphlet? When Eleanor Durham of Parents and Teachers for Responsible Schools checked the GLSEN web site, for example, she was shocked by what she found. GLSEN’s home page was an Internet doorway into every sort of pro-homosexual venue imaginable.
One GLSEN link, for example, was to a website that welcomed young people “who are searching out their sexual orientation.” It asked young visitors, “Do you feel that you might be bisexual, gay, or lesbian? This is the place for you.” (Emphasis added.)
What important information was provided to these young people? Pictures of naked same-sex teenagers embracing, a homosexual dating service where gay youth could find “partners or friends of the same sexual orientation,” and chat rooms where homosexual youth could meet others.
Durham said other perversions accessible from GLSEN’s web page included homosexual pornography, stories which included same-sex incestuous acts between fathers and sons, videos on sadomasochism, and listings for phone sex and live sex shows. Also available were free images showing naked men, genitalia, and oral sex acts.
Thus young people, who may truly be confused about their sexuality or simply curious, are literally funneled from schools through supposedly protective activist groups into the world of the homosexual lifestyle. And once there, susceptible children can be lured into homosexual pornography, same-sex friendships and, ultimately, participation in homosexual activity.
Homosexual experimentation
While radical gay activists insist that a pro-homosexual curriculum in schools does not increase homosexual experimentation, experience proves otherwise.
A 1998 study of almost 2,000 high school students in the Los Angeles area focused on the relationship between condom availability and increased sexual activity. The study was conducted by UCLA and published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute in Family Planning Perspectives.
One of the most overlooked results of the study, according to FRI, was a shocker: homosexual experimentation among the teens doubled following safe sex instruction. And of equal concern to FRI was the finding that 40% of heterosexual kids in the study had tried anal sex with their partners – a practice that significantly increases the risk of disease for the participants.
In San Francisco – arguably the most pro-homosexual city in the nation – school children have been pounded with the “gay is O.K.” message for years. How has this affected the city’s children?
According to an article in Time, Columbia University researcher Joyce Hunter said her investigation showed that 18% of teens in San Francisco claim to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or “questioning” their sexual orientation. The national average, according to Hunter, is somewhere between three and 10% of U.S. teens.
Adults prey on confused youth
But experimentation among teens and their peers is not the only concern for parents. Teens confused about their sexuality often consummate their first same-sex experience with an older homosexual, and statistics demonstrate that such first sexual experiences are a powerful force for molding sexual identity.
Journalist David Lipsky spent nine months traveling the U.S. and interviewing homosexual teenagers about their lifestyles, culminating in an article written for Rolling Stone. Although the tone of Lipsky’s article was sympathetic to homosexual youth, one of the things he found was a fluid interaction between homosexuals of different ages.
In Atlanta, for example, Lipsky said, “Young gay life functions as a kind of adjunct to adult gay life, with a lot of back-and-forth slippage.” There is even a lexicon of terms that describe the sexual interplay between adults and young homosexuals. One of those terms is “chicken hawk,” which describes adult male homosexuals who try to have sex with teens who have just come out of the closet – who are called “chickens,” or “fresh meat.”
From the homosexual teens who frequented one Atlanta mall, Lipsky learned that a lot of the young men had their first sexual experiences with an older man. Shannon Curtis, for example, had his homosexual initiation with two adult homosexual coworkers when they invited the then 14- year-old Curtis to their apartment.
Statistically this intergenerational sexual interaction is not an aberration. The SIGMA Project (1992), which interviewed and followed almost a thousand homosexuals in Britain over a three-year period, found that 50% of homosexuals had had their first same-sex experience with an adult by the age of 14. According to FRI, which reviewed the SIGMA data, 25% of those homosexuals had had sex with an adult by the age of 12 and 10% by the age of 10.
This adult homosexual fascination with younger partners is admitted even by the homosexual community. Two homosexual researchers (K. Jay and A. Young, 1979) found that 73% of male homosexuals had had sex as adults with boys 19 years old or younger – 23% admitted to having sex with youth less than 16 years of age.
According to FRI head Dr. Paul Cameron, research by the Kinsey Institute in 1970 found that 25% of homosexual men in San Francisco “admitted to having sex with boys aged 16 or younger while they themselves were at least 21."
Former homosexual Michael Johnston of Kerusso Ministries said he’s “found few in the homosexual community who would deny that their first homosexual experience was the result of initiation by an older man or woman.”
Sadly, these early homosexual experiences play a significant role in locking a young person into the homosexual lifestyle. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute have found “a strong relationship between those whose first experience was homosexual and those who practiced homosexuality later in life.” The work of Bell, Weinberg, and Hammersmith also found early homosexual experiences to be “very strong indicators of future, adult homosexuality.”
The results of a 1983 study by FRI parallels this data. Researchers (P. Cameron, K. Cameron, and K. Proctor) found that “two-thirds of the boys whose first experience was homosexual engaged in homosexual behavior as adults.”
Is recruitment really occurring?
While regularly ridiculed by most gay activists, the view that young people can be “recruited” into homosexuality is accepted even by some homosexuals themselves.
Activist Darrell Yates Rist, a co-founder of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and a prominent homosexual author, said he believes it is certainly possible for children to be “lured by queer ideas” into the homosexual lifestyle.
Rist said this truth is understood intuitively by parents and worries them, because “they too understand that sexually free ideas are infectious and that, once introduced to the suggestion of same-sex love, their kids might just try it and like it.”
Meanwhile, Johnston said that homosexual groups are reaching down to children as young as kindergarten age, “indoctrinating them to the idea that homosexuality is an intrinsic part of one’s identity; one to be explored and embraced. If that's not recruiting, I don't know what is." 
For other articles in this series, see AFA Journal, February, March, April, and June 1999.
